The Biden Border Crisis

FAIR's Preston Huennekens, Madison McQueen, and Matthew Tragesser discuss the ongoing crisis at the southern border which the Biden administration refers to as a mere challenge.

Show Notes

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The Federation for American Immigration Reform's podcast bringing you the most important updates about U.S. immigration. Featuring special guests including members of Congress, journalists, and experts in the field.

Intro:
Today on Understanding Immigration: The Biden border crisis

Preston:
Welcome back to another episode of FAIR’s Understanding Immigration podcast. This is Preston Huennekens with FAIR’s lobbying department and I am joined by our press secretary Matthew Tragesser and Madison McQueen from our research team. Today we're going to discuss the growing crisis at the southwest border. Apprehensions are up, the Biden administration has quietly rebranded detention facilities as “overflow shelters,” and immigration experts and those in the press are raising the alarm while the DHS secretary continues to deny that any crisis exists. We're going to dive right into it and explore the root cause of this growing crisis as well as offer some solutions that could put it on hold. Matthew, I wanted to go ahead and start with you. We saw just how hard it is to reverse the efforts excuse me the effects of a crisis like this one once they've started let's take 2019 for example, in that fiscal year we saw CBP apprehend over 977,000 illegal aliens. The numbers out in 2021 are so far dwarfing that year which was the highest on record what's going on here, what's driving this surge in the first place?

Matthew:
Well this is directly in response to the Biden administration's radical immigration policies and messaging towards migrants not only in central America, South America, but worldwide. In just a few weeks they've dismantled all southern border security by halting wall construction, by suspending the Migrant Protection Protocol program which has now put 25,000 asylum seekers from Mexico into the U.S. Just recently they introduced legislation in Congress that provides virtually a pathway to citizenship to every single illegal alien in our country. And so, these policies are basically telling migrants the border is open right now and if you come here illegally it's okay and we’ll reward you. So, this is definitely a self-inflicted crisis, it's disturbing, it comes at the worst possible time during this pandemic. It hurts our country from a fiscal standpoint obviously with large waves of illegal migration but also from a public health standpoint. This is obviously we're in the pandemic right now and we can't be having migrants who are testing positive for COVID being released into the interior of our country. And also, it hurts migrants who are coming on this dangerous journey to the U.S. border. They're being trafficked by human smugglers and cartels and that's a major problem, seven in ten migrants report facing violence on this journey, so it's a disaster all around, they really need to step back and reassess their messaging, the rhetoric, and kind of just the overall policies so far in office.

Preston:
Yeah and so could you kind of briefly just go over the differences in how the Biden administration is handling the current crisis compared to how former President Trump and his administration handled a similar surge in 2019?

Matthew:
Yeah so, the Trump administration definitely experienced surges of migration, illegal migration at different points within the last four years, from 2016 to 2020, but what they did immediately was say hey there is a crisis at our southern border and we're going to address it immediately. What we've seen from the Biden administration is absolutely nothing. You have the head of DHS, Mayorkas and press secretary Jen Psaki, they're not even calling it a crisis, they're calling it a challenge. President Biden hasn't even been down to the southern border he has yet to do a press conference on this crisis, so they're kind of essentially ignoring what's going on at the southern border. And what the Trump administration did was not only call it a crisis and acknowledge that there was a problem happening but they actually took quick and immediate action to address these illegal migration flows. Again, they implemented the Migrant Protection Protocol, so if you were an asylum seeker and you applied for asylum in the U.S. you'd have to wait in northern Mexico until your court hearing date and that helped drop illegal immigration numbers, drop asylum claims, fraudulent asylum claims, they built more than 400 miles of southern border wall which is absolutely great for our nation's border security and also they created these asylum cooperation agreements with the northern triangles of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, and this also prevented a silent abuse in these large waves of illegal migration. So, they acted quickly, they acted decisively, and they didn't ignore the crisis like the Biden administration is doing.

Preston:
Right so Madison I want to turn to you now, I want to ask you to kind of go over the numbers so that our listeners can get a sense of really how bad this is. How did the first four months of the 2021 fiscal year compare to the first three months of 2019 when we saw a border crisis that even the New York Times described as a breaking point for border security? And for our listeners out there ,because I know some of you have written in about this, we want to remind everyone the fiscal year begins in October so the first few months we're talking about since October 2020 which obviously was before Biden came into office he obviously didn't get inaugurated until January 20th but like Matthew said the issue has compounded since he formally became president, so Madison if you could just kind of describe for everyone what these numbers are looking like and the impact that it's having.

Madison:
From October to January fiscal year 2019 that number was 242,361. Now that same time frame for fiscal year 2021 that's 296,259. That's a difference of almost 53,000, so we're essentially a month of apprehensions ahead of where we were in 2019 right now. This rapid increase of migrants drains resources like welfare and other assistance programs. Additionally, it's a huge taxpayer cost, the average illegal alien cost U.S. taxpayers 9,221 dollars per year and Biden's border will undoubtedly drastically increase the illegal alien population in the U.S., which right now is 14.5 million so if we increase that with Biden's border the increasing cost is going to crush our taxpayers and create a larger net drain on assistance programs. It also places a significant strain on border patrol. The partially completed border wall did an excellent job in deterring migrants from crossing illegally, along with some of trump's other immigration policies like the MPP and ending catch and release. But for those who did cross, it funneled them into specific areas which allowed for smaller areas of patrol for the CBP. However now with Biden dismantling these protections and then his policies that are creating a pull effect at our border, migrants are crossing at an insane rate and CBP is struggling to catch up.

Preston:
And so you bring up a good point of there's tens of thousands of individuals coming every month. What happens to them once CBP apprehends them? Could you just kind of give the listeners a quick rundown of what happens when we do have nearly 300,000 people that border patrol has arrested since October? That's obviously a huge number of people and I think a lot of our listeners are kind of curious, what does that process look like from the moment they're apprehended, what happens after that? Could you just kind of go over that for us?

Madison:
Yeah well unfortunately Biden reinstituted the Obama-era catch and release policy which allows migrants to be released into the interior of the United States after they're apprehended in order to await immigration proceedings. So unfortunately, Biden has prioritized the fast tracking of processing and releasing migrants into the U.S., so these nearly 300,000 migrants have been released into border towns in a pandemic with little to no COVID testing and these border towns are having a really hard time coping with the hundreds of illegal aliens that are being dropped off by border agents at bus stations every day. And this is a very stark contrast to the approach to border security that the Trump administration took, in the midst of a border crisis Trump invoked the MPPs in 2019 and the Title 42 expulsions in 2020 due to COVID as a health deterrent, and as a result 90 of migrants apprehended by CBP were expelled from the country as of May 2020. That is not the case that's happening right now and like we've mentioned with the MPP about the Remain in Mexico policy, that has also been ended and so now all a migrant has to do is claim credible fear and they're permitted into the U.S. to await their immigration proceedings. But according to ICE testimony in 2019 before Congress, about 87% of illegal aliens that were recently released by the DHS did not show up for their scheduled asylum hearings. And comparatively when MPP and catch and release were not instituted that number was only about 49% which still isn't great but that's a big decrease from the 87% when these policies are instituted. Additionally, in 2020 about 81% of all asylum applicants failed to qualify for asylum in an immigration court according to the Executive Office for Immigration Review Statistics. We also have a lot of unaccompanied alien children that are coming over right now and being apprehended at the border and because they are under the age of 18 and have no parent or legal guardian in the U.S., they become custody of the department of health and human services. And so, these kids are held in what the Democrats called cages under Trump, but are now calling “overflow facilities” and in fact Biden just opened more facilities and raised capacity back up to 100% against previous CDC guidelines.

Preston:
Yeah, I’m pretty sure as well that kind of the detested Homestead, Florida shelter which actually Trump closed, I actually think I saw that Biden has reopened that and of course now that it's under Biden you don't see the ACLU protesting outside every day like you did under Trump. But I want to open up this next question for the two of you: our country's obviously going through a lot of issues right now, the coronavirus, the continued lockdowns for a number of cities, schools are closed, but this is a pretty huge deal too and it has its own public health implications. We already know that border state politicians in both parties are continuing to sound the alarm that these people aren't being tested for COVID after border patrol releases them into the public, so my question to both of you and we can just kind of bring this into a broader discussion is, why is this not getting more traction in the media? COVID is obviously the kind of the elephant in the room, but I think there's clearly more going on here.

Matthew:
Well I think definitely conservative media outlets are covering this issue and problem really well, but again it's these mainstream legacy outlets that are distorting the apprehension figures and kind of making these number manipulations that paint a different picture. One of the craziest things I saw in recent days was a CNN report saying that, “well the only reason apprehensions are climbing are because these are the same people who are being deported quickly and then just returning, these are the same people, it's not new people coming,” but I’m thinking it's still people coming here illegally no matter if they're new people, if they're people that have already been removed, they're still coming and that's still a problem, so to kind of paint in that narrative, I mean that is just absurd. I think a lot of people too, whether in the media or just a citizen, people feel like well if I’m not living at the border that situation doesn't really affect me I live in Wisconsin, New York, Washington state, I’m not affected by this but as Mark Morgan, FAIR’s senior fellow has said and he's a former acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, he said it perfectly he said that every American town is a border town and what he meant by that was whether it's illegal immigration, human smuggling, drug smuggling, all these things that are happening at our southern border affect every other American city across the country. And I think he's spot on with this and there are public health risks associated with illegal migration, there are fiscal costs dealing with welfare, education, medical costs involving illegal immigration. I know Madison your department did a great research report on the fiscal cost of legal immigration I think it was $116 billion on taxpayers annually which is absurd. Also, and let's not forget migrants are indeed testing positive for COVID-19 and they're being released into the interior of the country and are basically given a free pass to travel freely in our country and that's a major problem, it's not like these people came on tourist visa or here legally, they're here illegally and then released after testing positive for COVID, too. So that should be concerning to anyone in this country we know how fast COVID spreads, not to say every migrant is going to have COVID, but there are legitimate public health concerns with some portions of illegal migration.

Madison:
Well and like you said about the CNN report coming about like people returning, how is that any better? I mean when you look at, I think I remember a statistic that said it was 82% of single adults apprehended by CBP have already been deported at least once, so what are we doing with our policies that are incentivizing these people to come back? And that's what we're seeing with the Biden administration is they're putting major incentives on migrants to come here illegally and it's disenfranchising people who are trying to come the right way and not only that but they're the ones having to foot the cost of these illegal immigrants coming in and they're being put to the front of the line, which is even worse. So, the people who are trying to do it the right way who've been waiting 10 years to get into the U.S. are seeing people come in illegally and get rewarded right away. So we're really messing up our immigration system which is already deeply flawed, which is already creating a foreign-born population in the U.S. that's not based off of skill or merit, but rather family relation and if you came over here illegally, and that causes a huge problem in our future especially economically and socially what we're going to expect for our labor force in 10 to 15 years, what it's going to look like in terms of skill level and education, as well as taxpayer burden and welfare programs.

Matthew:
No you're spot on with that I mean how the Biden administration has handled this crisis is just unacceptable. I mean it's not only outright ignoring it, but then at a press conference yesterday or earlier this week press secretary Jen Psaki couldn't even confirm the number of migrant children who were being apprehended at our southern border. She said, “go to DHS for those figures,” the reporter said, “well I already did, they won't tell me,” and then Psaki goes, “well go again.” I mean it's just a complete nightmare. They need to be transparent with the American public, be held accountable, and if you can't even know how many children are being apprehended, how can you create any solutions? How can you solve this crisis? I mean it's really a mess and it's really impacting the Biden administration in just its first few weeks in the Oval Office.

Preston:
Yeah, and I don't even think there's a sense that they want to solve the problem. You see Alejandro Mayorkas get up on stage and say, “oh now is not the time to come,” inferring that there is a good time to come and it's just not, it's just down the road. They have not indicated at all that they plan to solve this in any way, seemingly they either truly think this is not a big deal or they're purposefully playing it down because they don't want to make it seem like the things that they've said for weeks and weeks on the campaign trail and the signals that they sent to all of these people from Central America, they don't want to have to own up to the fact that they are responsible for pushing them here. And I think it's just really, Matthew like you said, it's unacceptable that we have a self-inflicted crisis and our leaders are seemingly not doing anything about it whatsoever, they're just sitting on their hands and burying their head in the sand.

Madison:
Well back to the main question of why do we not see mainstream media covering this? And I think it's just because people don't understand the impacts that mass migration has and you want to see people on the left try to claim that they're environmental, that that's the issue that they own, and yet they ignore the environmental impacts that mass immigration has, they ignore the fiscal impacts that mass immigration has and I think they don't understand the breadth of impact that this will have on every city on every citizen. As we found in our “By the Numbers” report that we did earlier in the year, if the Biden amnesty is pushed through along with the refugee caps and the visa caps being raised, we will see an additional 52 million new immigrants added to America's population, along with our illegal alien population growing to about 20 million. That is a huge fiscal burden on the American taxpayer and I think we will see assistance programs like Social Security completely fade away. Additionally, the total annual cost of illegal immigration due to these policies if they do continue down this path will be over 204 billion dollars by 2024. And that will just continue to grow and the American people just can't support this, especially when we don't have… the argument is that, “oh well legal aliens pay taxes,” they only pay about $19 billion a year, that is nothing compared to what they are draining out of our society and it's not sustainable.

Preston:
Yeah that's a really good point. And I know there's been some figures that have been done about how even under a watered-down version of Biden's plan, it would still crush some of our entitlement programs. You brought up Social Security and that's obviously kind of failing on its own, to then put tens of millions of people into that system as future beneficiaries, that's like you said, it's just not sustainable whatsoever. And so, we've gone through this episode talking about the causes of this and so I kind of wanted to get into some solutions, for if the Biden administration wanted to solve this problem, what they could do. And we talked about this earlier, the biggest thing would be to just kind of keep in place what the Trump administration had done. The Trump administration stopped their border crisis by establishing the Migrant Protection Protocols, the Remain in Mexico program, it made these really unique asylum agreements with the Northern Triangle countries that prevented asylum seekers from just coming to the U.S. first, under these agreements they'd have to apply for asylum in a different country before they could come to the U.S. and so these were really smart tools that the Trump administration put in place to stop the crisis they had in 2019 because at that point, too Congress wasn't doing anything to help to help the problem, they weren't doing anything to stop it. So really all you'd have to do is just reinstitute MPP and restore those agreements and I think the problem would almost kind of take care of itself. But even then, I mean at the end of the day we're going to continue facing these waves of asylum-seeking aliens unless we fundamentally change our asylum laws and close the credible fear loophole and a great bill that actually just got introduced in the House and the Senate is the Asylum Abuse Reduction Act, which pretty much just, it requires asylum seekers to apply for asylum in their home countries at either a U.S. consulate or at the U.S. embassy. So, what it does in a sense is that it forbids people from applying for asylum when they come to the border, which that completely takes away the incentive for people to make that incredibly dangerous journey north and then it also it allows our asylum screeners to actually locate and identify the people who do qualify for asylum. The 10% of people whose claims would likely hold up in immigration court and facilitate their process so that they can get to the U.S. quickly and safely and it prevents them from having to waste their time on these 90% of the other cases that just have no basis, have no merit, and it prevents those people from, or rather it disincentivizes those people from coming to the U.S. in the first place. And then finally the Biden administration obviously did the opposite of this, but we have to get rid of “Catch and Release” that's one of the worst policies, it's one of the worst practices in our immigration system right now, this idea that someone has broken the law and you're just kind of slapping them on the wrist, giving them a court summons and then hoping they show up to court two years later. No sane country would ever do that in their borders and it makes no sense that we're doing that, so that has to end, and unfortunately the Biden administration has really just done the opposite of that, they've brought back Catch and Release, they ended the Migrant Protection Protocols and they ended these really important asylum agreements with the Northern Triangle countries.

Matthew:
Right, now I think all those especially for asylum are absolutely needed to kind of just get everything back to more of a normal level, but I would say it's even outside of asylum too, I mean let's not forget that they halted, the Biden administration has halted all southern border wall construction and there's earmarked money for that still and by basically stopping this construction you're wasting taxpayer money, that's, the money's already there to keep building a few hundred more miles of border wall and they've completely halted that, they're wasting U.S. taxpayer money. That wall will help, it's not a perfect solution, but it'll help secure our southern border better, help deter legal migration, and also this is not just a federal issue, this can be handled by local and state politicians and policies too. Look at all these benefits that are in various states including in-state tuition, driver's licenses, COVID relief, especially in California for illegal aliens. I mean all these little perks and benefits are absolutely contributing to people wanting to come here illegally. I mean you're being rewarded for being here illegally and so if we can get pressure on these local and state governments to stop handing out these perks or rewards, I think that's a great first step as well, I mean it's reducing the magnet that's strong illegal aliens to the country.

Madison:
Yeah I totally agree, I think that the de-incentivization of illegal immigration is by far highest priority because if we can de-incentivize, if we can make the communication happen again of, “if you come here, you will be deported.” That was a big deterrent, we saw the numbers drop, obviously numbers dropped in 2020 because of COVID, but prior to that when Trump put the hammer down on finalizing these final rules to crack down on asylum fraud, to put into action some of these bigger deportations, you're just expelled right away. That… it shows something you're, it's saying, “hey you come here, you're going to get in trouble,” and unfortunately that's not what the stance that the Biden administration is taking and I think that's something that we need to restore.

Preston:
There's even migrants themselves, when they're being interviewed at the border or are indicating that they came now because Biden is in office and because Trump is out. And they have said that, they said, “well now that Trump is no longer president, I think I had a better chance of getting into the country,” so words do matter and despite what Mayorkas and Psaki and even Biden himself are saying right now, you can't tell you can't signal for six-eight months that you're gonna amnesty every illegal alien in the country, that you're gonna throw the throw the gates open on the border, and then not expect people to come here. It is entirely the creation of Biden and his policy team and his communications team who have signaled for months that this is what they were going to do and now they're seemingly surprised that people listen to them.

Matthew:
Yeah and going off of that Preston, I was just going to say, it's also not even just policies, but it's just the messaging and the rhetoric. I mean on the campaign, President Biden was saying, “I’m gonna end all private immigration detention, I’m gonna freeze deportations for 100 days,” I mean to me if I was here illegally, I absolutely would want to remain in the country illegally and also, if I was not even in the country, I'd want to come and take advantage of that. So even if they're not even… if these policies aren't even in effect, there's still these sound bites and the rhetoric that are pulling people to come to the country.

Madison:
Well I think that's where we saw the rise in apprehensions start in October and November like the couple months leading up to the election, because Biden really hunkered down on the amnesty in his discussions and talking about, “we're going to give amnesty to 11 million immigrants,” (which is actually 14.5 and if it's only adults then it'd be about 12.5) but still that's a massive thing to say and so I think we started seeing, like people were saying, “I think Biden's gonna win, I’m gonna try to make it over,” and so we've seen, without that policy even coming into effect yet ,the masses of people who are here because they know if I can get here before this legislation goes through I am on a path to citizenship and I get the advantage and this advantage and this advantage. And again, it's just creating horrible chaos at the border, this is definitely Biden's border not Trump's anymore.

Preston:
Yeah these are great points as always and I think that's as good a place as any to end. So that's all the time that we have today, but we do hope that you've enjoyed today's episode and learned more about the growing crisis at our southern border and President Biden's role in creating that. As a reminder we're going to be releasing a new episode every other Monday. Our episodes are available on most platforms including Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Google podcasts. You can also visit our webpage fairus.org and our twitter handle @FAIRImmigration to access these episodes so please spread the word and share this podcast with friends, family and anyone who may be interested in learning more about immigration and its effect on the United States. Until next time, this has been Understanding Immigration presented by FAIR.